BETWEEN HIGH AND LOW, LAUGHTER AND TEARS: Making Yiddish theater “respectable” in turn-of-the-century Jewish Berlin

Observers of German Jewry have long used metaphors such as “symbiosis” to diagnose the status of modern Jewish identity in the German cultural sphere. Particularly since the Third Reich and the Holocaust, they have tended to be critical of the idea of “symbiosis.” The notion that an individual could be, at one and the same time, “German” and “Jewish” was anathema in the wake of Nazi Germany. A good deal of post-1945 historiography laments those Jews living in Germany before World War II as “assimilationist,” “self-hating,” or just plain delusional.2